My blog was going to be about Muhammid Ali and how a life so boldly and so generously lived provokes a worldwide – perhaps universal – moment to honor and reflect. This is different than the ultimate intimate moment that is described in The Actual Dance. His life has had so much meaning for me, as I suspect it did for many of my generation. We grew up with him especially during those soul searching times of the late 60’s and early 70’s when each of us then young men had to decide how we would deal with the seminal event of our lives, the Viet Nam war. Muhammid Ali stands alongside Martin Luther King in taking a moral stand and accepting the consequences of that stand with great integrity. And while he fought some of his own mental demons for a period, he evolved into a unique icon of integrity, generosity and love of human kind. His soul was definitely NOT broken, though at times we might have thought it was.

On June 12, 2016, a broken soul broke “our” hearts through an unbearable act of mass murder. There is a lot of speculation about motivations and causes the motivated the shooter. I got into an debate via social media (twitter) when I angrily posted something about the easy availability of guns. The response to me was: “don’t blame the tools, blame the motivation (radical Islam).” While I immediately dismissed this, thinking about it brought me to a new and different thought. Whatever else is “to blame,” the common theme in these horrible incidents appears to be a broken soul. Reading about the shooter, he seems yet another example of a person with a broken soul. Troubled inside, under achieved with a quick temper. A desperate search for meaning. Triggers and causes require fertile ground. Whatever else triggered or enabled the particular horrific action in Orlando, inside of this person was a broken soul.

The greatest sadness is always in the loss of the potential of the innocent lives that were taken. What we are left with then is The Actual Dance, not the intimate one of the loved ones, but in the words of The Actual Dance, the Dance of those of us in the Gallery. We are all watching the unbearable sadness of the losses of others and their struggle with it. Each life taken as a world destroyed.

​The Actual Dance proposes a beauty and dignity of the ultimate moment – the gift of being with someone you love at their last breath. Yet it also acknowledges the Orlando Moment. I explained it after Newton in a poem. Here it is again: